Sentinel Hub: Next Generation Satellite Imagery Processing Service

Start-up in the Spotlight: Sinergise

August 2018

Sentinel Hub: Next Generation Satellite Imagery Processing Service

The Slovenian SME Sinergise is an essential part of the Copernicus eco-system. Awarded as the Copernicus Masters Overall Winner and the winner of the T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud Challenge in 2016, the Slovenian start-up gained access to the first edition of the Copernicus Accelerator in the same year.

Sinergise’s winning idea of providing a streamlined solution for the distribution of satellite imagery is called Sentinel Hub. The GIS software development company may appear to be a start-up, but is already able to demonstrate a decade of experience in large country-scale geospatial applications for governmental clients in Europe, Africa and Asia. After experiencing the complex and costly process of acquiring the satellite data and integrating it into IT solutions, a small group of engineers decided to do the unthinkable: They created an imagery service capable of providing results in less than one second and operating with unprocessed data on a petabyte scale. They built an optimised system from scratch. Amazon provided assistant with regard to storage and together they established the Sentinel Open Dataset. The resulting combination ­ called Sentinel Hub ­ successfully demonstrates that a costly array database is not needed in order to perform most satellite imagery processing requests.

Today, Sentinel Hub is empowering application developers around the world to translate space data into useful information by building EO-based applications in precision farming, security, land administration, environment monitoring, etc. It is a fee-based service and users have quickly realised that it is much more cost effective to pay a small amount every month than to develop and maintain the processing chain by themselves. Analytical tools built on top of the core data distribution, such as multi-temporal processing, statistical API, custom band combinations and algorithms, time-lapse and more, make it even more attractive. Sentinel Hub currently processes almost two million requests every day.

Explore the Earth with free applications

With a strong belief that just about everyone should be able to access extremely valuable Sentinel data, Sinergise developed a public showcase demo application, the Sentinel Playground, providing access to its complete archive. Everything in full resolution, globally, either years ago or as recent as a couple of hours ago. EO Browser, an application that is a little more advanced, opens other satellite archives such as SAR Sentinel imagery, Landsat and MODIS. After becoming freely available to anyone at the beginning of October 2017, it exceeded even the start-up’s expectations with currently more than 12,000 monthly users who contribute to its success and improvements.

“Two years ago, we entered the space market by demonstrating a novel way to manage petabytes of EO data. Today, Sentinel Hub users process almost two million requests every day. This would not have been possible without Sentinel data and the visibility provided by the Copernicus Masters and the Copernicus Accelerator. Along the way, we have received tremendous support from the ESA and Horizon 2020 (H2020)* programme, which made it possible to focus on the long-term future of employing machine learning to derive even more value from the imagery. And, without the Copernicus Masters team, we would not even have started. – Thank you!” Grega Milčinski, CEO at Sinergise

“Sentinel-Hub’s mature value proposition made it clearly one of the strongest finalists at the Copernicus Masters and a well-deserved Overall Winner. The company has cleverly developed a sleek, easy-to-use tool and it has been growing very quickly by opening up new opportunities on the EO market.

Sentinel-Hub is a new service that can drive Sinergise’s scale-up phase by enlarging its customer base size and scope.

It’s extremely stimulating for me to have the chance to work with Grega Milčinski and his team by helping them to explore new directions and supporting their progress in this exciting phase of their business growth.”